CIA Says redaction of Commodore Amiga cost was an error

Under the prevailing information policies of the Central Intelligence Agency, even some well-known public facts, such as the price of a popular personal computer, may be withheld from public disclosure. The CIA should not have redacted the amount that was paid for a Commodore Amiga portable computer in 1987 from a recently declassified article, a CIA official said. (CIA: Cost of Personal Computer in 1987 is a Secret.) “The redaction of the cost of the Commodore Amiga computer was in fact an error,” said Joseph W. Lambert, Director of CIA Information Management Services. “Although we would normally redact budget figures, this clearly does not constitute a budget figure and should not have been redacted. The mistake was made in a high volume court deadline environment,” he said, referring to a FOIA lawsuit brought by former CIA official Jeffrey Scudder. “I have instructed my folks to make the appropriate corrections by lifting the redactions in question and then subsequently re-post the document to our website,” Mr. Lambert said via email. The revised document should be posted tomorrow. The Scudder lawsuit was not settled by the latest releases of hundreds of articles from CIA’s Studies in Intelligence journal.